While a senior in college, Christian Schwartz worked for a clothing company, designing t-shirts and labels. The aesthetic of one of the lines mixed industrial and military looks, which called for a lot of stencil type. He picked up some stencils at a hardware store and digitized the characters, since other companies regularly ripped off prints they designed with readily available fonts. In this particular set of stencils, the letters were designed to have as few bridges, or breaks, as possible, making the stencil effect more subtle than usual. 5608 Walnut Street was their address, and the source of the original name of the font, 5608. In 2005, Schwartz expanded the family and released it as part of the FontFont library in two variants, Solid and Stencil.